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Mass Effect 4 will use Battlefield 3 game engine

Work on the next game in the Mass Effect saga is ramping up, with Bioware announcing that development has been handed over to its Montreal studio. The previous games in the series were created at Bioware's HQ in Edmonton, although Montreal has contributed many of the sidequests and DLC episodes as well as Mass Effect 3's multiplayer mode.

More interesting from a gameplay perspective is the news that whatever form the next game takes, it will be built using DICE's Frostbite 2 game engine, most famously used for the extravagant destruction and epic scale of Battlefield 3.

The game definitely won't follow Commander Shepard, whose story came to a close in Mass Effect 3, and speculation is rife as to what form a new Mass Effect game would take. For now, Bioware is keeping its cards off the table.

"While [the next game] will be very respectful of the heritage built over the course of the first three games, with the original trilogy now concluded and the switch over to a new engine, we are exploring new directions, both on the gameplay and story fronts," studio head Yanick Roy said in a post on the Bioware blog. "You can still expect the pillars the franchise is known for to be fully intact though, including diverse alien races, a huge galaxy to explore, and of course rich, cinematic storytelling."